New York Times, Page A1, October 12, 1996.

Congress Bans Genital Rite

By CELIA W. DUGGER

Congress outlawed the rite of female genital cutting in
the United States just before it recessed two weeks ago.

It directed federal authorities to inform new immigrants
from countries where it is commonly practiced that parents
who arrange for their children to be cut here, as well as
people who perform the cutting, face up to five years in
prison.

The new law also requires United States
representatives to the World Bank and other international
financial institutions that have lent billions of dollars to
the 28 African countries where the practice exists to oppose
loans to governments that have not carried out educational
programs to prevent it.

Support for these measures -- included in an
end-of-session spending bill -- built this year as the case
of Fauziya Kassindja, a young woman who fled Togo to avoid
having her genitals cut off and sought asylum here, gained
attention in the American media, government officials
said.

"You keep trying to explain that this is not
circumcision," said Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., who
along with Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., has repeatedly introduced
bills in past sessions to outlaw the practice. "This is more
like Lorena Bobbit. Once they really find out it goes on and
is not some victim fantasy we're having, they're
horrified."

Experts say there is no way to measure how many girls are
being genitally cut in the United States since the rite is
usually performed privately.

But the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention recently estimated that more than 150,000
women and girls of African origin or ancestry in the United
States may be at risk of the rite or have already been cut.
Researchers developed these rough estimates by matching 1990
Census
Bureau population data on the number of girls and women
whose families came from the African countries where the
practice is customary with estimates of the prevalence of the
rite in those countries.

New York and Newark, N.J., as well as Los Angeles and
Washington, are among the metropolitan areas where the
largest number of these at-risk girls and women live,
according to the estimates.

The data was gathered in response to an April directive
from Congress. At that time, Congress also told federal
health officials to develop a program to educate immigrants
about the dangers of the practice, which they are now
doing.

The federal ban on genital cutting, which takes effect six
months after the law's passage on Sept. 30, comes when states
and health workers are increasingly debating how to respond
to a cultural practice that is a highly valued rite of
passage among some African immigrants, but is abhorred by
many Americans.

California, Minnesota, Tennessee, Rhode Island and North
Dakota are among the states that have outlawed the practice
in the past two years, congressional researchers say.

A group of physicians at the the Harborview Medical Center, a public
hospital in Seattle, have taken a different view. After
Somali mothers repeatedly requested that their daughters be
genitally cut in the hospital, the doctors proposed what they
considered a largely symbolic form of the ritual: nicking the
tip of a girl's clitoris, with her consent, under a local
anesthetic. No tissue would be removed, they said. The
proposal has stirred an emotionally charged debate there.

"I think that this is an issue that should be decided by a
physician, the family and the child," Abraham Bergman, chief
of pediatrics at the hospital, said. "Privacy should prevail
and the brouhaha is inappropriate."

It is not clear whether the procedure being proposed in
Seattle would violate the new law against what Congress
termed "female genital mutilation," government officials
said.

The Federal law provides for the prosecution of
anyone who "circumcises, excises, or infibulates the whole or
any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of
another person who has not attained the age of 18."
Infibulation involves stitching together the labia to largely
cover the vagina.

Members of Congress say they believe the United States
needs to send a forceful, clear message to immigrants here
that female genital cutting is a practice they must
abandon.

They say the United States should follow the example of
the French, who over the past 10 to 15 years have criminally
prosecuted parents in more than 30 families from Mali,
Mauritania, the Gambia and Senegal for the excision of
daughters. Such cases are usually reported to the police by
doctors, who detect the practice while examining the girls.
Usually, the convicted parents have been given suspended
sentences, though occasionally they get prison time.

"At first the doctors hesitated, saying, 'We cannot betray
families,"' said Linda Weil-Curiel, a lawyer who is France's
leading crusader against the practice. "I said, 'Your first
obligation is to the child. If you do not report a family
when you notice they practice excision, then the next child
born will be excised, too. You bear the responsibility."'

The congressional push to outlaw genital cutting in the
United States was led by a handful of senators and
representatives. Reid, the point man in the Senate, said he
first lost sleep over this issue in 1994 after CNN broadcast
a video of a 10-year-old Egyptian girl being cut.

"They grab her and hold her down and rip out her genitalia
with a razor blade," Reid said, adding that he thought at the
time of his two young granddaughters.

"I said, 'What am I going to do about this?' All my staff
advised me to stay away from it. You have to be careful on
issues like this. Is this something a man should be involved
in? The first time I talked about it on the floor, I felt
very uncomfortable. You're talking about a little girl's
vagina."

Representative Schroeder, who is retiring from the House
of Representatives this year, has been working on the issue
for more than 20 years.

Both said in recent years that they have been unable to
get a ban through Congress. They said some members simply
could not believe that the practice actually goes on. And
some were worried that it would lead to proposals to abolish
male circumcision.

This year, they said, their years of pestering their
fellow members, combined with greater press attention to the
issue, including a series of articles in The New York Times,
and the Republican-controlled Congress's desire to counter
the tendency of female voters to support Democrats, led to
passage of the law.

A separate measure to pressure African governments to take
action in their own countries had another important ally in
the Senate, Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the
foreign operations subcommittee of the Appropriations
Committee.

The provision, which takes effect a year from now, made
United States support for loans from international financial
institutions dependent on foreign governments carrying out
educational campaigns against genital cutting. It charges the
secretary of the treasury with deciding whether U.S.
representatives to the lending institutions will oppose or
support loans and grants to countries.

"Some in the World Bank bureaucracy have always taken the
position that if the United States suggests another country
do something differently, the client countries will react
against it," Leahy said.

"In fact, it is through this kind of pressure that we've
had changes necessary in a number of countries, ranging from
privatization in the former Soviet Union to female education
in developing countries. This requires diplomacy on the part
of the international financial institution, but they have a
lot of people paid a great deal of money to practice that
diplomacy."

Officials in such financial institutions as the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund say that the
success of the new American strategy will depend on how
diplomatically it is carried out.

"If it highlights the problem, it will be constructive,"
said Eric Chinje, external affairs officer for Africa at the
World
Bank. "If it provides an instrument for fingerpointing,
it will be counterproductive."

(The New York Times often publishes second rounds
of letters and rebuttals to published letters)

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